This Fourth of July, “Democracy Now!” remembers Frederick Douglass’ defiant Independence Day address, read by James Earl Jones during a performance of Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” and the life and legacy of legendary American folk singer Pete Seeger, who died this year at the age of 94.

An errant ink splotch or a genuine period? A scholar says an official transcript of the Declaration of Independence contains an error that has led many Americans to misinterpret the document for almost two centuries.

On this Independence Day-themed show, Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists ponder the meaning of America. If our nation was founded by revolutionaries, what would they think of our current surveillance practices, economic opportunities, gay rights and foreign policy? Is NSA leaker Edward Snowden in the tradition of the founders of this country?

We find ourselves, 237 years after the Founders declared us a new nation, in a season of discontent, even surliness, about the experiment they launched. We are sharply divided over the very meaning our founding documents, and we are more likely to invoke the word “we” in the context of “us” versus “them” than in the more capacious sense that includes every single American.

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Here’s a Catch-22 for the tea party movement: Cities across the country are going without Independence Day celebrations this year due to budget cuts. We know how our tax-hating friends love to wave flags and celebrate the late 1700s, but somebody has to pay for all those explosives, and, more often than not, it’s us.

I survive the degradation that has become America—a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism—because I read books.

As we head into the Fourth of July weekend of patriotic bluster and beer swilling—but before we are too besotted with ourselves—might we also for once consider our imperfections? Why not take a moment to heed the cautions of our founding father, George Washington, whose true legacy will most likely be ignored during the flag-waving weekend?